


we may contain the urge to run away

by elenoir



Series: and all of these stars are silent [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Denial of Feelings, Idiots in Love, Jealous Keith (Voltron), Jealousy, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oblivious, Pining, Shiro's chillin in the astral plane, Slow Burn, so many meme references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 14:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14875311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elenoir/pseuds/elenoir
Summary: “Wait - Lance - with Lotor?” he chokes out, the gears in his head turning rapidly just to keep up. “Swords?”“Well, boys will be boys.”The gears keep turning.Holy shit, he thinks,this isn’t good.Keith catches glimpses of his team through a narrow window.





	we may contain the urge to run away

**Author's Note:**

> Prequel to _you, on your part, have no need of me_.  
>  You don’t need to read the other piece to understand this one, but just know that this isn’t so much of a buildup to the second, but serves as additional character study and establishing the dynamic between Lance and Keith before the events of the sequel.
> 
> Also, vines aren’t so much littered throughout the narrative as they are gigantic, orange roadblocks. Be careful.
> 
> Enjoy :)

 

* * *

  

Keith has barely entered the mess hall when Marlov comes up behind him without warning and shoves a tablet into his hands, beaming ear-to-ear. Keith’s hand immediately goes to his blade.

“I _told you_ not to do that!” Keith snaps, because it's early in the morning, and the fact that someone as _loud_ as Marlov can also specialize in stealth is inconceivable. The Marmora base is definitely a step up from the Garrison (and three steps up from standard military school, at least) but somehow still retains the rigid uniformity of corporate hell. The schedule is cut and dry, except when it isn’t and Keith has to wake up in a matter of seconds after half an hour of sleep, and Keith finds himself wishing for simpler times when Allura’s insistence for team bonding was the most irking agenda of the day.

At least he’s still useful; his new comrades are stoic and unreadable on the field, but Keith can play that game too.

“You'll wanna see this, Keith,” Marlov grins, showing white canines.

Of the few acquaintances Keith has made, Marlov is undoubtedly the most laidback, the sincerest. He reminds him of Hunk, in a weird way. He's almost seven feet tall, and Keith has seen him impale someone else's face with their own kneecap before, but he also watches reality television and the intergalactic equivalent of _The Bachelorette_ religiously on downtime, so he doesn't worry him too much.

Keith glances at the screen; at first, he scowls, because it's just a live feed of Voltron’s publicity tours, and it's not as though he would've _enjoyed_ parading around performing skits about himself, but something bitter like nostalgia (and possibly heartbreak) twists around in his insides like nausea.

Then he focuses, actually watches what's happening, and he can hardly believe what he’s seeing.

The rope descends, and holy shit, Lance can _move._

 

* * *

 

It’s not a surprise to him, because he knows firsthand that Lance has legs a mile long and could bend himself into a pretzel if he wished, but -

“Look at him,” Marlov sighs dreamily, “he's gorgeous,” and Keith is inclined to agree, until he realizes what it is that he’s agreeing to and comes back to his senses. He blinks.

“I, um,” Keith says intelligently. “He’s okay.”

 _He’s okay,_ Keith snorts in his mind. ‘ _Okay’ my ass._

“‘Okay’, my ass,” Marlov unknowingly agrees, much to Keith's chagrin. “I don't know about human beauty standards, but he meets all of mine.” Keith thinks of the paladin plushies he's seen sold at open markets, and the revenue that Voltron must be raking in. “Can you introduce me?” he asks casually. “He is your old teammate, right? You still talk?”

Keith freezes. Something terrible and electric grips him then, and the realization that anyone and everyone can see Lance (and Keith is watching through a screen, halfway across the universe) has him seeing red. His hand tightens into a death grip, and if he wasn’t wearing gloves he would probably see his fingertips flush white. He hands the tablet back to him.

“No. He’s busy.” Keith says stiffly.

“Busy as in ‘saving the world’ busy, or busy as in ‘he’s taken’ busy?” _Calm down._ “Man, are you alright?” Marlov crouches down as if Keith is a child, and peers closely at his face. “You're looking a little red. You okay?”

Keith tries to shove past him.

“Move, I'm gay.” Keith mumbles. Wait. That wasn't what he was trying to say. “Wait - no - okay. I'm okay.”

“Gay _and_ okay?”

“No, no, just okay.”

“So, you're _not_ gay…?” Marlov gestures at the tablet.

“...”

Keith changes his mind. Marlov is nothing like Hunk, and he can fuck off and let Keith eat his breakfast in peace.

 

* * *

  

“Hunk and Pidge usually train together,” Lance explains. It’s a good match, since the two have such drastically different combat styles and shared coordination. “I mean, we switch it up sometimes, but…” they usually fall back into pairs, is what he means. Shiro faces off with Allura, since they have the most similar combat stats and pairing either of them off with a paladin other than Keith for casual purposes would have been vastly unfair. He glances around the training deck; it’s not a team exercise so much as it is one-on-one sparring. Allura is nowhere to be seen, which means that she’s probably watching them from a distance.

“What about you?” Lotor asks, keenly interested. Lance blinks in surprise.

“I usually train with Coran,” he jokes, but is met with a skeptical expression. “Keith. I used to train with Keith.” Lance confirms in a flatter voice, and something in Lotor’s face seems to click. He stands up straighter and reaches for his sword.

“You have me now,” Lotor smiles, wickedly sharp, but the tension in Lance’s chest doesn’t appease. He feels wrong, somehow, and he almost doesn’t want to draw his weapon. _I used to train with Keith._

“Yeah,” he says, more than a little uncertain. “I guess.”

 

* * *

 

“Ribbon dancing, huh?” Keith’s mouth tilts up into a small grin. “When you'd learn to do that?”

“It's aerial silks,” Lance protests, defensive. It's barely been a minute since he accepted the call, and already Keith’s making fun of him. Maybe some things never change. Then again, they’ve only been facetiming for about a week, and already Keith’s picked up on the nuances of casual, teasing conversation. Maybe he's even stopped growling. “And it wasn't my idea - before law school, Veronica was really into dance and tumbling, all that jazz. I just got swept up into it. But yeah, I've got some moves,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Keith laughs. “You can call it that,” he says, thinking back to how eagerly some of the Blade members eyed Voltron’s broadcasts, and the dreamy expression in Marlov’s eyes. “The Blade seems to think so,” he adds before thinking. Immediately, he wants to shove his foot in his mouth, but Lance only raises an eyebrow and _preens_ like a peacock and readjusts the screen. Dick.

“What, do I have fans from the Blade of Marmora?” he asks, mockingly flattered and oddly eager.

“They're twice your size, Lance,” Keith tells him, amused and on edge (he's not sure why, but he is).

“Even better.” Lance’s smile splits his face, wide and white and pretty as he remembers.

“Gross, Lance.”

“What? I’d just like to know if you’ve got any friends you can introduce me to,” he tells him innocently, batting his eyelashes.

He's joking, he's joking, right? Of course, he is.

“In your dreams,” Keith snorts, scrambling for composure. _Stay calm. Don't blow this._ What he is not prepared for is for Lance to wink at him, almost as a reflex. It's the same look he gives to girls that he meets on alien planets, overly-suave and full of bravado, but it's never been directed at _Keith_ of all people. He should be unimpressed, but his heart feels ten times lighter.

“You betcha,” Lance shoots a finger gun at him and clicks his teeth, the cheeky bastard. Keith's cheeks burn.

 

* * *

 

“I'm not scared!” Lance insists. “I'm just...cautious.”

“If ‘just cautious’ means ‘scared shitless’, then, congratulations. It shows,” Pidge tells him, rolling her eyes. Hunk gently nudges her shoulder with a look, _go easy on him, please_ clearly being conveyed.  

“I'll show you shitless,” he mumbles. Pidge wrinkles her nose - _that doesn’t even make sense_ she mouths at Hunk. “I can do this,” he mutters, more to himself than anything else.

“Is that so?”

“Yep.”

“You know that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, right?” Hunk says, gently setting a hand on his arm. “ _Just because he cornered you when you were alone in the hallway and asked for explicit permission to stab you on a daily basis, and he’s definitely a murderer with narcissistic tendencies and poor defense mechanisms that are probably easily triggered by the fact that he just killed his own dad, literally weeks ago, doesn’t mean he’s actually going to kill you,”_ is what Hunk wants to say, but he doesn’t, because it doesn’t sound like the truth, and it’s far from comforting. Instead, he says, “If you don't want to spar with Lotor, or spend any time with him whatsoever - like, any time at all, believe us when we say that we completely understand, and we wouldn’t think any less of you for it.” He pointedly ignores Pidge rolling her eyes into the back of her head so hard that only the whites peek through.

Lance goes silent.

“My mom may have raised an emotionally insecure child, but she didn't raise no _bitch.”_  Lance declares to the open room after a moment. Pidge raises an eyebrow.

“Insightful,” she deadpans, while Hunk only pats his shoulder and laughs. Lance is nothing if not brave. Or stupid.

“You tell him, Lance.” _Lance is going to get himself killed_ , he thinks mournfully. He can’t help it.

“Thanks, Hunk.”

 

* * *

 

If he had his rifle at long range, Lance could probably come out on top. Lotor’s quick, but Lance is a good shot. Terrific, even.

Unfortunately, Lance doesn't have a rifle; he has a broadsword that feels natural and right in his hands but still foreign somehow, and Lotor is a phenomenal melee fighter. He could give Keith a run for his money, which means that realistically, Lance doesn't stand a chance.

 

* * *

 

Lotor disarms him in a second and then punches him across the face, quick as a whip, and Lance can see the _stars_ , all shining silver and gold around him. His head snaps back with a satisfying _crack_ , and Lance knows in a split-second that a bruise will flower and blossom by morning.

“Time out!” Lance angrily chews up the words and spits them out, because he's a lot of things but he doesn't consider himself a quitter. Lotor relents, sheathing the sword that was probably about to be shoved into Lance’s sternum, and holds out his hand with the air of someone commiserating a loss. Sportsmanship.

Lance makes a feeble attempt to shake before stumbling backward. He slumps against the wall and slides down to the floor - the crack of the wall panel juts against the back of his head, and he tilts back and closes his eyes to the feel.

The prince moves to sit next to him; Lance tenses, which is fair, considering that Lotor spent the last half hour kicking the shit out of him without remorse. Lotor raises an eyebrow, but only sets his sword against the wall and leans with it. It's an imitation of camaraderie.

 

* * *

 

"Don't - don't you ever get tired of it?"

"Tired of what?" Lotor shifts to look down at him, and his bone structure looks sharper under the light and Lance thinks that he looks beautiful (beautiful like Allura, in a way that is foreign and untouchable and terrifying in all that it is).

"You know, what you've seen." _What you've done._ "The war. The fighting." _The death. The stench._

Lotor tilts his head thoughtfully, as if considering, and he looks so starkly different from Keith - who he's grown used to seeing covered in sweat on the floor of the training deck - that Lance wants to be sick.

He doesn't like comparing the two, because it feels _wrong_ , somehow (lose one half-Galra, gain another), but he can't help it.

The both of them have gone through the same things - they've both lost a parent to the void of space, gone to some place like hell and fought their way back, screaming and ripping through a second womb, a second skin.

But maybe Lotor is not the same as Keith, doesn't have that same struggle for a conscience. Lotor uses control over every aspect of his being in hopes of compressing and compacting himself into desirable angles (it's in the way he fights and the way he walks and the way he fucks people over); Keith tucks the idea of control away into the folds of his hands and tries to forget about it (because he's so capable and worthy of everything the universe has to offer that he doesn't know what to do with himself).

Lotor knows what he wants to be, and Lance didn't know Keith well - _bullshit, Lance,_ says the voice in his head sounding suspiciously like Pidge - but he got the impression that Keith didn't have a clue, and existed through will and brimstone alone. At least, that's what he thought.

The key difference, Lance thinks, was that Keith just wanted to be good. Lotor is exactly what he says he is.

"Not really," he says easily, just as easily as Lance imagined he would. Then, "death's a part of life, isn't it?" Lotor manages to sound both smug and bitter, but it's still not what Lance expected.

I don't want to die up in space, Lance thinks to himself. If he does, it'll be a whisper, hardly enough to cause a ripple in the universe. He'll never see Veronica get her degree, or if Luis found the courage to ask out that girl from algebra I. Marco will never know that Lance was alive and pining for home this whole time.

I want to be brave, he realizes, because death terrifies me.

"Yeah, I guess."

 

* * *

  

The fast pace of life with the Blades is a thousand times more brutal, and yet Keith finds that it gives him more time to think. This could be because so much is done in silence; his comrades have masks for faces, and there’s hardly any room for conversation when any and every mission could be your last (of course, it was the same with Voltron, but somehow Keith wasn’t as afraid).

Are you afraid now, Keith?

Not really, he thinks. Just alone.

 

* * *

  

Lotor doesn't know what's worse - the paladins assuming he's a monster, or Lance suspecting that he has a heart of gold. Thankfully, the blue _\- red, he means_ \- paladin is an idiot, but he's not stupid, if that even makes sense.

When it comes to Lance, not much does. The boy is a walking pyre of contradictions that his own team is blissfully unaware of, and Lotor delights in the idea that he alone can see past the exoskeleton.

He's funny, charming, and charismatic - he's also sparingly brash, awkward, and shrill. The vibrancy of his personality, always fluctuating and always _loud_ makes Lotor want to simultaneously clamp Lance’s jaw shut with an iron or stare and stare and never stop.

The boy is _beautiful_ (physically, he's a specimen of Earth that's polished and glittering in bronze and gold, but his soul is a blue that Lotor has never seen before), yet laden with insecurities, delicate and ugly, that follow him like dead weight.

He's not bad in combat, either. He's a pro with a rifle, maybe the best shot he's ever seen, but in close combat he's simply good enough. They'll work on it - the boy’s a lover, not a fighter (dear Lord, would Lotor _pay_ to see that) but he figures that it won't take long. Sparring, done properly, is an intimacy. Already he knows Lance better than he's known Allura (Lance doesn't know _him_ as well as she does, but Lance is an open book. He's full of twists and turns and hidden chapters, but Lotor has always been a scholar, and he'll find them all).

Lance is a quick study, and fights like he's knows that he'll die, biding his time before he goes and counting down the seconds with his fists.

“Up,” he tells him, brisk and careful. Lance only squints at him, incredulous. “No time to waste,” Lotor chides, taking him by the elbow and hauling him to his feet. “A moment’s hesitation can be the difference between life and death.”

Lance stands on his own.

There's something inside of Lance that leaves him a gaping wreckage of emotion and misguided drive; Lotor has become weary of those who move through battles simply by _feeling_ but it works for Lance, because his head is still tactical when he puts it to rest. Lance is no red paladin, no matter what his lion says, but the potential (burning, bubbling, overflowing) fills the gaps in between, roaring like a waterfall. The first red paladin was an idiot to leave.

Lotor has worked all his life to be more than enough, and he'll be damned if he isn't the best partner Lance will ever have.

 

* * *

  

“Were you up late with Lotor last night?” Pidge asks casually. Lance shrugs, uncertain.

“Uh, yeah, I was. Sparring.” Pidge eyes his crossed legs. It’s a disgusting thought, one that she’d rather not associate with him ever again, but the mental image of Lance limping through the door with a shit-faced grin plastered on his face makes her shudder.

“Sparring? Is that what the kids call it these days?” she asked, eyebrow raised. His cheeks immediately flush - _he just kicks really hard, you know? He goes for the joints,_ he’d protested. “Do we need to call Keith?” she follows up slyly. He looks at her expression, and immediately gets it.

“Wait, wait, no, Pidge, it’s not what you think!”

“I won’t hesitate,” she grins, hand already twitching towards her communicator. _Bitch._ Her hand falls instead, and she only folds her arms. “I’m only joking. It’s cool. We love him.”

“I thought you hated him?” he asks curiously, cocking his head.

“Yeah, no shit, Lance.”

* * *

 

Pidge calls him sometimes, but they don’t have a lot of video sessions, mostly because she’s always busy coding or creating weapons of mass destruction or something of the like, and Keith’s schedule is both rigid and irregular, always the highest priority. That, and it’s easier to casually speak than it is to look into a screen and initiate a conversation.

This time, she calls first.

“Hey, Pidge.”

She grunts in response, and he can hear the faint sound of something heavy sliding against a hard surface - probably her laptop, he surmises.

“Lance needs you,” she says, blunt as he remembers. Keith’s heart turns molten and tries to jump out of his throat. He almost chokes on it.

“What.”

“He needs someone else to hang out with, and Lotor’s _dumb._ You can hear them going at it at like three in the morning,” she goes on, “and it sucks ass because they’re _noisy._ If they practiced with anything other than their fucking swords then maybe the castle wouldn’t sound like two toddlers were trying to murder each other - but _no,_ Lance doesn’t know how to shut his mouth. It’s to be expected, but they could at least have the common fucking decency to scream a little more quietly, you know? I’ve got projects,” Pidge sighs and sniffs, “I’ve got dreams, too, and they sure as _heck_ don’t involve Lance’s personal life.”  

There’s too much content to process in a single sentence, but Keith tries anyway. He fails, so instead he asks,

“Why are you up at three in the morning?” Pidge snorts in response.

“When am I not? It’s Satan’s hour, the demons are out.” When he doesn’t respond, because he isn’t sure how he should react (he does wonder how Shiro stays intact these days) she continues, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Lance can do whatever he wants. If he wants to sing at the top of his lungs whenever he showers, that’s fine, because he has the voice of an angel - don’t tell him I said that. If he wants to eat like a pig, that’s fine too, because it makes Hunk happy. If he wants to be a dog, then _woof_ , you know? He can do whatever he wants with Lotor. As long as he does it _quietly_.”

“Wait - Lance - with Lotor?” he chokes out, the gears in his head turning rapidly just to keep up. “Swords?”

“Well, boys will be boys.”

The gears keep turning. _Holy shit,_ he thinks, _this isn’t good_. A younger, naive Keith’s mind would’ve immediately jumped to sparring, but Lance is _handsome_ and the only sword he has is - don’t think about it, don’t think about it, close your eyes and think of England.

It’s a mistake. Closing his eyes just makes it worse.

Keith isn’t one for metaphors - if there’s something to say, why not just say it - but he’s pretty sure he knows a euphemism when he hears one, and coming from Pidge, it’s basically a confirmation. “Together?” The last part comes out like a squeak.

 

* * *

 

Pidge is grateful that he can’t see her on the other side of the line, because she gets the feeling that her own smile is something evil incarnate.

Meddling brat, indeed.

 

* * *

 

“Pidge, it’s late. You should be getting to bed.” Lance taps the lid of the computer, and she jerks it back before it can close.

“No.”

“What’s the worst that could happen if you blinked for the first time in two years?”

“I could fall asleep, lose track of my work, and play a part in the destruction of an entire planet.” she answers without looking up. Her eyes feel hollow and she feels like shit, but her fingers fly a mile a minute, the loudest noise in the room. Lance only leans against the couch, sipping noisily from a mug he swiped from the kitchen. He doesn't even _like_ coffee, the ass.

“Damn, insomnia’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Nah, Lotor’s the bitch on this ship. Insomnia’s a tool to be utilized.” If Matt was here, he'd probably be trying to tape her fingers together.

“I think he’d take offense to that.”

“ _I_ think that I _don’t_ care, and if he does, then he can suck it up.”

“Maybe you should stop bullying him,” Lance suggests. “He’s gone through a lot, and if I were him, I can’t say that the first thing I’d want was a tiny gremlin threatening to chop my dick off every time I opened my mouth to breathe.” She raises one brow, and her fingers slow but don’t stop. Lance sighs, hands on his hips.

“You sound like my _mom,_ ” she informs him.

“If your mom told you to go to sleep, would you?”

“My mom knows that true genius can’t be interrupted for something like sleep,” Pidge scoffs, shooting him a dirty look.

“Wise words from a twelve-year-old,” he snickers.

“I’m fifteen, so shut the fuck up.”

“Same difference.”

“Oh, go _suck_ a dick.” Pidge grumbles into her laptop.

“Fine, I will.” Lance sniffs haughtily and turns on his heel, marching towards the hallway. Pidge’s eyes follow him in the dark.

“Keith’s doesn't count!” she calls after him.

With his back turned, she doesn't see him flip her off, but returns the gesture anyway.

 

* * *

 

Shiro stumbles across Pidge in her natural habitat; she's surrounded by electronics and fast asleep. It's not quite dark yet - that is to say, the lights in the castle are dimmed, but not off completely. The galaxy outside fluctuates and changes but remains the same, with no indication of day or night. Still, the castle hours climb up the walls and shrink and vanish when they wake. A sleeping Pidge is a rare Pidge, indeed.

When she’s not in constant motion or hunched over her screen, he can see how small she is - he’d never say it to her face, not if he wanted to escape with his hand intact, but it’s true. Stilled by sleep, it’s easier to follow the slope of her nose and brow bone; like the rest of her face, it’s not quite aristocratic, but small and pretty and comes to a point. Caramel strands of hair sweep over her temple like a crown, and Shiro thinks of the Katie before the Kerberos mission who he’d only met a few spare, separate times, and yet felt as though he'd known her for years.

 _“Katie would love this,”_ Samuel would say every time the Holts stumbled across new evidence or confirmation of a theory that Takashi himself couldn't comprehend. _“Katie could kick your ass at that,”_ Matt would grin at him whenever they played chess, and Shiro would laugh and agree, because Katie was essentially another presence on the ship at that point.

He’s seen her take down men ten times her own size, and he also knows that her bones are delicate, like a bird taking flight. Looking at her sprawled out on the couch, dead to the world, Shiro finds it easier to remember how young she is, how young all of them are.

“God, look at her,” Lance mutters next to him, startling him out of his reverie. He hadn’t noticed that Lance was in the room - this makes him uneasy, for some reason. It's just Lance. “For a demon, she looks like a freaking woodland fairy.”

Nerves aside, Shiro feels inclined to agree. Lance doesn't sound surprised; he grew up with a plenitude of younger siblings after all, all of whom he loved dearly, but were living hell on earth when they were awake.

Katie’s family spoke about her like she was the future, like the world rested in her hands and she was going to mold it as she wished.

He knows what they meant, now. He doesn’t think they’re wrong - then again, the Holts rarely are.

 

* * *

 

It was Coran’s idea to hold a press conference online, and in theory, it wasn't a bad idea. It was easy to set up and could broadcast across the galaxy with little technical issue. “It's also a way to achieve transparency with the public. We'll be speaking with more than just diplomats behind closed doors - this is a chance for planets to get to know us beyond your shows!”

“The shows that _you_ set up, right?” Hunk clarifies, uncharacteristically dry.

“I - um, well, yes. That's true,” Coran tweaks his mustache uncomfortably. “But I was under the influence at the time. This is an opportunity to break away from some - _unfortunate_ stereotypes, and expand our horizons?”

“That sounds good, I guess…”

“Great! The podcast has been set up for hours, and there are already thousands of incoming calls.”

“Wait, what?”

Lance nudges his shoulder. “C’mon, how bad can it be?”

 

* * *

 

“Can the blue paladin choke me with his thighs?” This is only the twentieth caller of thousands, and from what Shiro can gather, it's not much more than a group of giggling, adolescent girls.

Allura, Shiro, and Lotor exchange looks. The princess is at a loss for words, while Lotor looks ready to crush the microphone. Shiro clears his throat.

“No off topic -”

“To clarify, _will_ the blue paladin choke me with his thighs?” one of them cuts in eagerly.

“I don’t want to -”

“Is he single?”

Lotor straight up _snarls_ and leans into the mic _._ “No, there’s no -”

“Can I touch him?” another female voice asks. “Does he want our coordinates?” Lance’s cheeks go dark, and he looks crossed between terribly pleased with himself and embarrassed to death. Pidge takes his arm and tries to drag him out of the room while Lotor seizes the mic.

“Permission denied, that’s an off-topic question -”

“How big is his -”

“Next, next -” Shiro manages as he grapples with Lotor for the mic.

“What’s -”

“Stop, stop -” Lotor presses his palm flat against Shiro’s face and shoves him away.

“Why -”

Lotor ignores Shiro’s flailing limbs and slams his hand down on the button, effectively cutting out the audio. The clamor of questions, rising in octave and frequency, go silent, but the screen indicates that the calls are still pouring in. Apparently, they'd only been increasing the moment Lance’s persona was brought up, and the questions were pouring in faster than could be translated.

“You have been stopped.” Lotor glares darkly at the screen from where he’s wedged over the arms of Shiro’s chair. Shiro doesn't have a god to believe in, but he tries to pray anyway.

 

* * *

 

He’s not going to tell Lance that he stays up late to watch the Voltron shows, with the lights turned off and the screen on its lowest settings, still bright enough to cast a luminescent glow in the dark and drape the shadows over his face.

He’ll never tell Lance that it’s his favorite thing to do when nobody else is watching, because they’re still his friends who seem like they don’t exist anymore, and he misses them so much that he’ll take what he can get.

Maybe Pidge hates the script and the script hates Hunk and Lance thinks that Coran’s slowly going insane, but Keith must be going a little insane too, because a part of him believes that they’re having _fun_ regardless of the setbacks. They suffer together, and they’ll keep doing so until the universe is saved, and then some.

It’s _Voltron_. He could just say that he’s a fan.

 

* * *

 

“None of us are in our element, and neither are you. How do you know what’s good for all of us?” Lance argues.

“That’s _MY OPINION.”_ When Shiro’s voice tapers off into an uncharacteristic screech, Pidge and Hunk exchange glances.

They’ll be hard pressed to find an activity that Shiro _doesn’t_ somehow excel at. Anything combat-related, he sweeps the floor with the competition. Meditation? His mental control is stellar. Chess? Pidge has him beat, and Hunk’s decent competition, but Shiro has a solid streak. Basketball? No problem. Laser tag? Don’t ask. Twister? Shiro had come out second place, losing very narrowly to Lance, but who can blame him?

Hunk thinks they’ve done it, though. Allura wanted them all to bond, Lotor included, but so far, the newest addition to the team doesn’t seem to be the weakest link. Shiro, on the other hand, sucks ass. It’s a little refreshing, to be honest.

“It’s just baking, you guys,” Hunk mediates, holding up his hands like he’s Chris Pratt trying to tame velociraptors in the wild. From the looks of it, he’s not too far off. “Don’t worry, I can take it from here.”

“Some bonding exercise, huh?” Pidge mutters out of the corner of her mouth as she pulls out a bowl and a whisk, peering over his shoulder to where Shiro is glaring daggers at Lance. “They’ve been arguing over nothing for the past half an hour.” She frowns. “This is like Lance and Keith all over again, only like, way less homoerotic. What’s the fun in that?”

What’s the fun, indeed, Hunk thinks sadly.

 

* * *

 

He looks on in horror. Dear lord, these are the defenders of the universe, Lotor thinks. How are none of them dead yet?

 

* * *

 

“It's dry,” Lotor says matter-of-factly over their first batch. “Not to mention that it’s not particularly _sweet._  I’ll admit that I’m no expert when it comes to Earth cuisine, but I can say for sure that Altean royalty would not have a taste for this - biscuit.” His lips curls in contempt, ever-so-slightly, at the last word. Hunk’s never-ending well of patience is drying up pretty quickly.

“It’s biscotti, dude,” Lance tries to say around a mouthful, but it comes out “ _iff biffoty, ood._ ” Lotor raises an eyebrow, clearly charmed. Pidge tries not to barf.

“Yes, but perhaps you catch more flies with honey than vinegar? Are we even making it properly?” Lotor reaches for the recipe with a frown, and Hunk fights the urge to shove his own hand into his mouth. Shiro had given up minutes ago, an unheard feat for him, claiming he was suffering from a migraine and needed to go lie down. Although Lance snickered something about ‘being an extra hoe’, they let him go in peace. Unfortunately, the Galran prince stepped up and into the limelight that Shiro left. Hunk did not appreciate it.

“He needs some milk,” Lance swallows and says with a smile. “That’s how you’re _supposed_ to eat it.”

“Uh, we’re not finished with the second batch.” Hunk frowns. “There’s still more we need to add.” Lotor ignores him, reaching for a spoon.

Lance and Pidge glance at each other this time; this can't end well.

“First we’ll -”

Hunk presses his hands to his cheeks and sucks in a deep breath.

“Oh, my god, will you let me do what I need to do?”

“I’m trying to help!”

Help, his ass.

“Stop,” Pidge produces a spray bottle from underneath the counter and sends a spray of what Hunk _hopes_ is water into Lotor’s face, and he recoils and hisses like a cat. “He could've dropped his biscotti!”

“Pidge, that was for prepping the pan!” Hunk exclaims.

“Sorry. That was wrong of me.” Pidge deadpans.

“To be honest, your shocking lack of etiquette is more than a little unnerving,” Lotor says dryly, dabbing at the corners of his chin with a towel. “If you really _must_ speak your mind, then go ahead and do it, but there’s no need for such vulgar language. It's unbecoming of a Paladin of Voltron,” he adds with a wide smile.

“Well, _excuse my potty mouth_ , but shut the fuck up, Lotor.” Pidge smiles sweetly, folding her hands under her chin.

“Language,” Shiro warns loudly from across the hall, and she shoots the opposite room a look that means certain death, but bites out,

“Fine - I’m tired of you, you _fricking frick._ You’ve officially made me _lose my marbles._ ” She pulls a face, and Lance is reminded of a wild animal frothing at the mouth. “Happy, _Dad?_ ” Pidge hollers back.

“Better,” Shiro replies, reluctant and equally as loud, which was impressive for someone suffering from a migraine. “But the delivery could use some work.”

 

* * *

 

The next batch turns out arguably better - most notably, Allura is thrilled with the results, and Lotor doesn’t have it in him to complain.

 

* * *

 

“I heard about the Voltron podcast.”

“Oh, you did?”

“Yeah - _aCHOO!”_

“Is someone awake?” The patrol’s voice can be heard from the hallway, loud, gruff, and unflinching, and although there’s no curfew or protocol against staying up, Keith freezes.

Pause.

“Oh, nice one, Keith.”

“What, so I’m not allowed to sneeze?” he hisses, angling the screen towards the tabletop to drown the glow in the dark.

“You're not sick, are you?” Lance’s voice filters through the speakers, softer and, if Keith can believe it, worried. “If you caught some weird space STD, Shiro’s going to lose his fucking mind more than he already has.”

“I don't have an _STD, Lance,”_ Keith snaps in spite of himself.

“Space does all sorts of weird things to the body -”

“Yeah, like make me sneeze, right?”

“It could!” Lance insists, shrill. “You know, we never did get space vaccines. Think of all the viruses we could've caught.”

“You have healing pods, Lance. I think a healing pod can handle a little _space herpes._ ” Keith cringes the moment it comes out of his mouth. Lance doesn't seem to notice, waving his hands around _like an idiot_ , Keith thinks fondly.

“You don't know, though, do you?” Lance points out, triumphant. “For all you know, any day of hanky-panky could be your last.”

“What - I'm not -” Keith sputters, and he thanks both the dark and his hood for hiding his flushed cheeks before remembering that the device is still face down on the tabletop. He props it up against the wall. “There is no _hanky-panky_ going on here - and don't call it that - besides, even if there was time for that sort of thing, it'd be betraying the integrity of the organization.” Dammit, he sounds like Shiro. From his bemused expression, Lance seems to think so, too.

“Someone has a stick up his ass.” He grins at him, and even though his body isn't in frame, Keith can imagine him folding his arms and cocking his hip. “You seriously haven't made _any_ friends?”

“We wear masks, Lance. There's not a lot of socializing going on.”

“Masks, huh? Kinda kinky.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says hurriedly. “But have you seen those uniforms, Keith? The dominatrix vibes with the lines, and the curvy-things, and how tight -”

“I'm aware, Lance,” Keith says dryly, trying and failing to conceal his irritation. Clearly Lance knew what he was talking about, but the thought of Lance taking note of any of the Blades like that (Keith’s _coworkers_ for fuck’s sake) has his jaw clenching so hard it hurts.

 

* * *

 

“So, what'd you think?”

“Of what?”

“The podcast?”

“Oh, that. Right. It was...interesting?”

“Yeah?”

“Lotor seemed pretty passionate. He sounded pretty diplomatic in the beginning, but towards the end, with those girls -”

“He went kind of crazy, yeah. It's kind of flattering, actually, that he cares so much about Voltron’s image. Allura was _pissed,_ but you can't please everybody.”

“Sure.” Keith’s mouth thins, and he's almost certain that Lance can't hear the skepticism loaded into the word. “So, you two are close, now?”

“Nah, he’s an ass - he can’t take a joke. Maybe it's a Galra thing?” Lance locks eyes with Keith and grins like the sun, and something peculiar and fond prods at the corners of Keith’s mouth and has his own heartbeat thudding in his chest. “You know, he’s kind of like you,” he smirks, “but his hair is one of his best qualities.” Lance says it lightly and without any real heat, but Keith’s insides burn with something akin to envy, and his hands clench.

Lotor’s not a replacement for him, he’s not, Keith reminds himself. He'll never be a paladin.

“There's nothing wrong with my hair,” Keith says, relaxing for a moment. Lance is the one who pilots Red, he thinks, and then backtracks, because Lance isn’t a replacement either, but the lions seem to have an innate ability to know what’s best for the team, and if anyone was going to fill the gaps that Keith kept leaving, Red trusted him to fill it.

Keith trusts him to fill it.

 

* * *

 

“Lance mentioned Lotor.”

“Mhm?”

“He’s been mentioning him a lot, actually.”

“And...?”

“Nothing.”

Silence.

“He kept saying how similar we are! We’re not!” he bites out, fuming. Pidge cocks her head.

“Why’s that?”

“He’s dumb, and he’s a coward,” Keith snarls, “and I’m _not_ a coward.”

“No, you’re not,” she says agreeably. “Although, when it comes to Lotor, coward - _maybe -_ but dumb? Not even close.”

“Didn’t you spend ten minutes complaining about the fact that he pronounced ‘milk’ wrong?”

“It’s not ‘mulk’ _or_ ‘malk’ but somehow he used them both in the same sentence! He was doing it on purpose!”

“Are you...okay?”

“Who, me?”

“Yeah, is everything else...okay? Like, with Lotor? He hasn’t been driving you insane too, has he?” Keith chuckles nervously.

“No, no, it’s great here...we have a lot of laughs.”

 

* * *

 

“Way to go, Lotad. You've deprived the mice of their indoor plumbing system.” Pidge deadpans in a muffled voice. From the torso-up she's inside of the wall, the grated panel tossed to the side while Hunk watches on. He hands her a screwdriver and reviews the hologram blueprints again with a frown.

“It's Lotor.”

Pidge wrenches herself out of the opening in the wall and sits back on her haunches, dust smeared across her forehead.

A braver man would've cowered; as it turns out, maybe Lotor just has no self-preservation instinct, contrary to popular belief, because the sight of a pissed off Pidge barely phases him.

Hunk gets it - Lotor just wants to fit in, to help, and so he's taken to following them around wherever they go, hopefully for the time being. His mistake was letting Lotor offer to help them in an area that he clearly had no expertise in. His other mistake was not making sure that he and Pidge were at least two rooms away from each other.

“It's also wrong; you said you wanted to help, but I don't see exactly how you're helping when you can't follow simple instructions!”

“You yelling in my face isn't helping, either!”

“You're not even a radar technician.” she throws up her hands, exasperated. “Why would you even -”

“It's working fine,” Lotor sneers, picking up the screwdriver and poking around the open panel, “why are you -”

“Lotor, Lotor, watch the pipe!” Hunk whisper-yells, too late.

The pipe shatters, and Hunk’s hopes are ready to go with it. Pidge beats him to it.

“This is why Lance doesn't _fucking_ like you!”

“He doesn't?”

Hunk sees the way his face flickers into something resembling _heartbreak_ , thinks of Keith and the nearly identical expression directed at Lance, and thinks, _oh no. Not again._

Pidge buries her face in her hands, takes a deep breath, and looks up sweetly. The grime from her forehead has transferred to her cheek.

“I wanna hit you in the face as _hard as I can,_ so work with me, because I _don’t_ want to do that.”

She bares her teeth in a winning smile that would make Keith proud.

Lotor nods slowly.

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

“You're reading that wrong.” Next to him, a girl leans over and taps the spine of the manual he’s trying, struggling, and _failing_ to decipher, with a knowing grin. Keith looks over - her purple smile is sharp and wide, but not malicious.

“Huh?”

“Unless you can read upside down, you're reading it wrong.”

“Oh, thanks.” _Your mullet must be getting in your eyes,_ Lance would say.

Keith never pegged himself for an idiot; that role was mostly designated for Lance. Then again, Lance was affirmatively bilingual, and picked up new languages far more easily than most of the paladins, so perhaps it was a tad hypocritical of him.

The girl eyes the manual - he’d only just picked it up, really. He was using up some of the rare downtime on base and had found it nestled away somewhere and flipped it open out of curiosity. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t read it, although some squirming, irrational part of himself felt like he _should_ be able to, which was crazy. After all, he had been raised on Earth.

She leans closer, and he instinctively leans away, but that doesn’t deter her. She squints her pupil-less eyes, and Keith isn’t sure whether he should run for it or stay put.

“I'm Mira. You're the paladin, aren't you? How old are you? You look a little young for a Blade, although I suppose we've had younger recruits.” She places her hands on her hips and tilts her purple head - she’s taller than him, which isn’t surprising because everyone here is, and he realizes that she must be older, too, despite the high cadence in her voice.

“Uh,” Keith isn’t sure what to say, but her eyes widen, and she clasps her hands over her mouth.

“That was so rude of me, I'm so sorry! Let me try again. I'm Mira, what is up? That's Earth slang, right?” Mira says eagerly. She doesn't strike him as a Blade type, even in full armor, but then again, Marlov didn't either, and he could bench press Shiro. Who knows what she could do?

“Right. Um. Hey, what's up?” He winces. “I'm Keith, I'm nineteen, and I - I never learned how to read? I mean, I _can_ read, I just can't read _this_ language. At all.”

“At all?”

“Yeah.”

“What about other languages?”

“English, mostly. And Korean, but not as well - it's from Earth.”

“How did you communicate with other civilizations while you were a paladin?”

“I - I actually have no idea.” Keith realizes. “I mean, Allura - the princess - was usually the diplomat, and we didn't really understand other languages, we just sort of caught onto it really quickly?” Now that he thinks about it, he isn't exactly sure how they managed to communicate with so many other species. What were the odds that so many different civilizations and planets spoke some variation of English? His own Korean was rusty, English was technically his only fluent language, and it was unlikely that he was just a naturally gifted linguist.

“Maybe that's one of Voltron’s powers?” she suggests. “Some sort of technology that helps you communicate?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Can you at least try?” The Galra gestures towards the booklet.

Keith squints at the tiny symbols and the small illustrations scattered sparsely throughout. The letters remain alien, foreign on the page, but the drawings ring a bell; he thinks of Hunk’s workspace, and the way his blueprints sometimes spilled over to Pidge’s side of the table. He takes a wild guess. “It’s about…mechanical repair?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Mira says, surprised. He is too.

“Well, it’s about time,” Keith mutters under his breath. He can’t understand the language, but at least he’s got enough of his head left to recognize basic illustrations. Mira frowns.

“No, it’s about mechanical repair.”

“Metaphors really go over your head, don’t they?” Keith says dryly, before he can stop himself.

“No, they don’t. I’m too fast; I’d catch them.”

All of a sudden, he’s rather glad that the rest of the paladins aren’t here. Pidge would be having a field day.

 

* * *

 

“If we had to?”

“And there was no other option?”

“Correct.”

“And I can’t just get someone else to do it for me?”

“Nope.”

“This is hypothetical, right?” she clarifies, examining her nails.

“Right.”

“Hm. Well, Shiro’s tactical, resourceful, and keeps his head in a fight, so he’ll be more aware of what’s going on around him. I would avoid the arm altogether; his fighting style is basically flawless and the most well-rounded out of all of us, meaning that he can counter the largest variety of attacks, but his most effective weapon is his Galra hand, and I could probably hack that - no, I _know_ I could hack it. I could never match him hand-to-hand, but an attack from the inside is one that no one sees coming.” she muses. Lance’s jaw goes slack, and Hunk gently closes it for him.

“What about Lotor?”

“I’d go for the legs, probably,” Pidge muses. “Because then that bitch can't run nowhere.”

Lotor chokes from where he was lingering behind the couch, clearly longing to join them - Hunk’s no pushover, no matter what anyone else has to say about it, but he feels a twinge of sympathy. Lotor may be a horrible person who’s done horrible things, he reasons, but even genocidal enslavers of planets deserve a little affection, right?

A little.

Lotor did have prominent daddy issues, after all (and Keith turned out fine).

“Maybe we should play a different game,” Hunk says quickly, trying to catch his gaze. _It’s okay, you can play,_ he tries to communicate. For all his aloofness and the aura of ice that refuses to crack, it’s like coaxing a child out from hiding underneath a table. Lotor averts his eyes, and the gesture startles Hunk, it reminds him so much of Keith.

Hunk’s eyes flicker over to Lance instead. Has he noticed? No, he’s shoveling popcorn into his mouth, eyes fixed on the Altean movie that the four of them had been steadfastly ignoring in favor of discussing hypothetical death scenarios.

“Alright,” Pidge says agreeably, which is never a good sign. True to form, her eyes take on a wicked gleam, and she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose with a quick flick of her fingers. “Fuck, marry, kill.”

“Hell, yeah!” Lance exclaims.

 _Language,_ Hunk imagines Shiro saying.  

Instead, Pidge opens her mouth and loudly says “Lotor, Zarkon, Coran.”

If Lotor abandons the alliance and throws Pidge (or himself) out of the airlock within the next few hours, Hunk will neither blame him nor stop him.

 

* * *

 

“Sooo...how's the Blade?” Lance asks this time. He has his face mask on, and Keith’s told him a thousand times by now that he looks absolutely _ridiculous_ , but it's still Lance underneath, and that's what matters to him, so it’s not like he minds. It’s getting late, even for Keith, but so far, he can’t bring himself to hang up first.

“It's good.”

“Cool, cool,” Lance nods to himself like he's convincing himself to take a running head start over the edge of a cliff. “Good like, ‘I really like it here’ good, or good as in ‘it's mediocre and I miss Voltron’ good?”

It takes a few beats.

“Go to bed, Lance,” Keith says, sounding more tired than Lance probably is, but the boy only nods.

“Okay. G’night.”

The screen light extinguishes itself, plunging Keith into darkness. He sets the device on the nearby table and pulls the covers over his head.

 

* * *

 

“When are you coming back?” Lance asks the moment Keith opens the next call. His eyes roam Keith’s face, and Keith gets the distinct impression that he’s looking for something he knows he won’t find.

“I don’t know.” Keith answers after a moment. He waits and lets that one settle. Lance tries again, looking disturbed.

“Why -”

“I need this, Lance.” Keith cuts him off. “I need this thing, and I - please don’t make me -” the words tumble through his lips, stiff and genuine and cut up in fragments, but Lance understands. He doesn’t bring it up again.

 

* * *

 

The latest battle is rough, as most are, with reinforcements coming in at the last moment. Even with Zarkon gone, there was still resistance to Lotor’s claim to the throne, and those who were loyal to Zarkon held key roles in the power play. When Marmora’s fleet arrive, Lance’s heart skips a beat and he subconsciously tries not to seek out a ship that could belong to Keith. He tries not to dwell on it.

 

* * *

 

“You were, uh, really good out there.” A blush takes root at the tips of his ears and threatens to engulf and burn him alive. “You fight good?” Lance curses himself because he’s _so fucking awkward_ and Keith probably already _knows_ by now that’s he’s amazing, and whatever the hell they're doing out in space, it’s in his blood.

“But I wasn't really trying,” Keith frowns, baffled. “I just sort of just improvised it…”

“Well, whatever you did, it looked cool, alright?”

“Are you saying I’m _cooler_ than you?” Keith asks, bemused. A smirk plays at the corner of his mouth, and Lance buries his face in his hands and tries not to scream.

“Oh, my god, why can’t you take the freaking compliment…” he mutters into his jacket sleeves.

Keith doesn’t catch this, but he raises a brow.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“If I had a penny for every time I wasn’t cool, I’d have -”

“You’d be rich, Lance,” Keith informs him.

“- no pennies. Ouch. That was mean.”

Keith only shrugs.

“Good job, though,” he says after a moment, quietly. “You looked cool, too.”

Lance is going to die.

 

* * *

 

Keith knows that he's pretty good at what he does. He doesn't let the Garrison’s backhanded praise go to his head, but he's faster and stronger than most of the opponents he's faced, and it's not without hard work.

Today, he's not sure that it even matters, not when he's getting the shit kicked out of him by his own teammates.

“What the fuck _, Richard?_ ” Mira hisses at the taller Galra. The trio was back to back, deflecting floating blades that were strikingly similar to the orbs back on the castle’s training deck, but currently, Keith is flat on his own back, winded and sporting a bleeding nose.

_“What?”_

“He's tiny, look at him!”

“It was an accident!” Richard protests, and it’s true. Unused to Keith’s height, he’d twisted around to hurtle a spinning disk - a ‘magic murder frisbee’, as Lance would've called it - at an approaching blade, only for it to catch Keith in the side of the head.

The trio is no Voltron, but they do tight, efficient work, and Keith trusts that Richard wasn't trying to kill him. Still, he feels less tight and efficient and more like he's going to pass out any moment now.

“Are you okay?” one of them asks, leaning down, a purple, out-of-focus face in his vision.

“Guhh,” Keith says intelligently. He hopes that Krolia isn't watching.

 

* * *

 

She is, naturally.

 

* * *

 

The next time Pidge calls, he’s absolutely miserable, and she tells him so.

“You look like trash.”

“You are trash,” he snaps back. “How’s Lance?” Keith asks after a moment. He hears Pidge take a deep breath - the quiet _clink_ tells him that she’s adjusting her glasses, probably in exasperation.

“You know, if it’s bothering you that bad, you should just confess.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“The next time he calls you, just look him dead in the eyes and say, ‘damn, boy, you’re thicker than a bowl of oatmeal’. He’ll appreciate it, trust me.”

“No.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I don’t know what it means, but I wouldn’t trust you if my life depended on it,” he tells her with a straight face. He’s lying through his teeth, but he’s being guided by logic, not by sentimentality.

“Listen, I know that you’re probably raised by wolves, but in this day and age, someone like Lance would really appreciate it. He wouldn’t know thicc if it literally hit him in the ass he doesn’t have.”

Keith snorts so loudly that the inhabitant in the next room must’ve heard him, because now he knows that she’s messing with him.

 

* * *

 

Lance and Shiro seem to be clashing more than usual, to the point of Shiro raising his voice and _yelling_ like Lance isn't a seventeen-year-old boy tasked with saving the universe along with the rest of them; this is unnerving to Pidge, not because she thinks that Shiro would go so far as to physically hurt Lance (or any of them) but because it reminds her that Shiro is, for all intents and purposes, the sole paternal figure on the ship, and good-natured patience is what they’ve come to expect.

Her own father never yelled at her or Matt unless absolutely necessary - and he never yelled like that. Maybe, she thinks with a shiver, this family is nothing like that one.

 

* * *

 

“Shiro, _what the hell_ was that?” Pidge rounds on him, furious, with Hunk right behind her. She doesn’t even come up to his shoulder, she’s nearly half his size, but she’s murderous and at the perfect height for hits below the belt, so it counts for something. “Lance was trying to help,” she bites out, and watches Shiro blink in surprise at how vicious she sounds, “and you’re not doing anyone else favors when you do a complete one eighty and _shove your head up your ass._ ”

“Keith never pushed it like this!” Shiro protests, like it’s obvious. He’s wrong; Keith pushed it all the time, pushed past barriers and boundaries like they didn’t exist, because for him they didn’t. Bullshit, Pidge thinks, and the same sentiment is on Hunk’s face. It’s two against one, but she doesn’t know if it matters when one is possibly out of his mind.

“ _Keith_ is not _here,_ ” Pidge says slowly, through gritted teeth, like she’s speaking to a particularly shitty six-year-old, “and when he was, he and Lance didn’t argue like that; they bantered like an old gay married couple. That was neither gay nor banter. It was out of line, and it was _mean._ ”

“He needs to learn,” Shiro says with a clenched jaw, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d think she was looking at a stranger. “Insubordination isn’t an option right now, and he needs to learn to _settle_ for the sake of the team.”

“Shiro, you ignorant slut.”

Pidge claps a hand over her mouth. She said that one out loud, she’s pretty sure. She can't take it back, not with the face that Shiro’s sporting, but she can take charge and let him cool down, which is exactly what she does.

Pidge doesn't run out of the room; if you asked her, it was merely a brisk pace with Hunk on her heels.

 

* * *

 

Pidge thinks that if Keith was here, as his right-hand man, Shiro might be more like his old self.

While Hunk agrees that with Keith here instead of an exiled prince (who may still be bent on universal domination) things might've felt more normal, he also knows that it wouldn't be because Keith is his second-in-command. Keith is not his impulse control, not the way that Lance was to Keith, and Keith is not a partner to Shiro as he is to Lance.

Hunk may not be the prodigy that his own partner is, all nimble fingers and a brain working faster than her mouth can move, but he prides himself on how well he can read people. He doesn’t change and adapt like Lance can when he needs to, or simply reprogram them like Pidge, but he knows and he sits and he waits for them to expose themselves for what they truly are. Sometimes he’s surprised, but it’s rare.

Shiro leads people like a martyr while Lance makes them fall in love; Pidge can read code like a second language and manipulate humans half as well, and Keith - well, Keith can cut through them like butter. That counts for something, but Hunk understands that it’s often not a matter of who’s around but a matter of who they are, and how they decide to react to said company.

Keith does not rein Shiro in. That was never his job, and it never could be. Keith is his little brother, and things would feel normal because he loves him - they all do - but that doesn't mean that Shiro wouldn't have changed.

With Keith here, it would've just been harder to notice.

 

* * *

 

“Lance -” he starts, but he chokes on what he wants to say. Lance seems to understand, though, because just grips the device on his end tighter, readjusts the frame.

“We’ll be fine. Promise.” He shoots him a lopsided grin, all teeth and dimples, the kind he reserved for the younger refugees they would find on planets ravaged by the Galra, and suddenly Keith wants to cry through the screen.

Keith wonders if he’s talking to him like he's a child because he _knows_ that while Keith doesn't believe in miracles or fate or bullshit, he does believe in Lance. It's stupid, completely irrational, and the only option, but that seems to be Lance’s specialty (provoking him into doing stupid things while also being the last voice of reason he has left).

Lance waits for a moment, frozen with that stupid grin on his face, waiting for Keith to say something. Anything.

 _Please don't die. Be safe, idiot,_ Keith thinks, but it's no use, because as long as Lance is out there risking his life to save the universe, he'll never be safe, none of them will be (Keith can crash into as many ships as he wants and let the heat of the impact engulf him again and again, but he can't save Voltron).

Lance stands, moves out of frame for one second, and then he’s gone.

 

* * *

 

I don’t want to outlive you.

That's something he wishes he could tell Lance, but only if he was being very honest with himself, which won't be happening anytime soon.

It's true, though.

The thought seems preposterous, because Keith is the one who’ll probably die a quiet, anonymous death in a mask and on a mission, somewhere down the line.

Lance is brighter, though, and bigger than Keith ever was. Voltron needs him, the universe needs Voltron, and the more it needs, the more endless the quest for liberation will be. Somewhere along _that_ road, Lance will die in a rain of fireworks. He'll go out with a _bang_ and his absence will send waves across the cosmos and be felt by the universe, which is really only fitting, but really, Keith doesn’t want to think about him dying at all, or anyone else.

 

* * *

 

It must be the thousandth time that he's tried out another pickup line on Allura - all of which are very smooth, stop laughing, Pidge - and she's only rolled her eyes and shaken her head, albeit fondly, but it’s rejection nonetheless. He's not being serious - it had stopped being serious _months_ ago, because she’s started feeling remarkably like a sister, or even a maternal presence - but he's left watching her retreating back as she leaves the room when a light bulb pulses in revelation and shatters above his head.

“Oh my god, she's a lesbian.” Lance realizes aloud, put out.

“I thought she was Altean,” Coran says, bewildered. “What's a lesbian?”

“Lance, even if she is, somehow I don't think that that's the reason why she doesn't want to be with you,” Pidge says dryly. He shoots her a dirty look.

“Why not? I’m handsome -”

“Debatable.”

“Charming -”

“Heh, you're funny, too.”

“Exactly! I'm funny -”

“In love with Keith -”

“Right,” he nods without thinking, “in love with Keith, I exfoliate regularly, have thick - wait - you know what, Pidge? Fuck you -”

“You said it, dude.”

“What's going on?” Allura cuts in suspiciously, returning from the depths of the kitchen with a tray of something that smells delicious, no doubt thanks to Hunk.

“You're a lesbian now, apparently,” Pidge tells her offhandedly. “And Lance admitted that he’s gay for Keith. Yay.”

Allura’s brows furrow, puzzled. “But I’m Altean?”

 

* * *

 

Their intel is incomplete, maybe purposely so, and the moment he steps onto the planet and breathes in the air, he’s doomed. The atmosphere is poison.

His mask covers his entire face, but it doesn’t have the same security that his helmet as a paladin offered; his mask didn’t isolate airflow because somehow his superiors weren’t aware of the high toxicity levels.

He finds out later that they really truly didn’t know, but it’s a small comfort.

Keith takes a few steps towards open civilization, shrouded by strange trees and foliage, intending to head onto the open road. It’s night here, and there’s a mooning hanging in the sky like a pendant, striped green and casting a luminescent glow on the cities blooming off into the distance. Keith’s throat seizes, and he collapses.

The dirt is foreign underneath his nails and the atmosphere is sickly sweet like iron in his throat, and Keith coughs and coughs into his mask, and can’t form the sentence to call for backup. He feels like he’s drowning, and he immediately thinks of Lance, who swims like he was born in the water and probably isn’t capable of drowning against his will (it’s a stupid thought, because dying in the water is not the same as clawing at his own mouth and ripping at his own throat just to breathe). His vision is blurring and turning dark at the edges, and Keith knows that it’s only a matter of time before his consciousness gives way. He feels something firm grasp him from under the arms and haul him up like a sack of potatoes, take off running. The dizziness in his head is an ache, sharp and jilting like nausea.

The last thing he remembers is his head bouncing off of someone else’s shoulder and the sight of his arm dangling uselessly, slung over someone’s back, and then the dark comes to swallow him up.

 

* * *

 

 And suddenly he’s on a beach, running towards the shoreline and kicking up a spray of fine, white sand. Everything here is bright, like someone is shining a flashlight into his eyes, and he has to blink to adjust to the vibrancy of all the colors.

Someone’s running with him, only just ahead, and he catches a glimpse of a tan hand and long legs, but Keith’s eyes are fixed on the ocean where it meets the horizon. The surface looks nothing like any ocean Keith has seen; he’s been to the depths where it’s cold and heavy, where inky blue bleeds into the darkness like shadows, and cold plants drift around the floor as ghosts. Up here on the surface, though, it’s intensely warm and gentle and somehow feels bigger than the desert ever did.

He can see a small throng of people, silhouettes against the sun, along the shore. Two younger children race up and down the beach, the waves only just sloshing at their ankles, and a young woman with curly hair lounges in a chair a few yards away.

He knows, somehow, that this is Varadero, Cuba.

When Lance told him about all of this, he could hardly believe that a place like that could exist, but he can see it now, _he can see it,_ how the colors mold into one another like swirls inside a marble, curled into cut glass. The skyline meshes with a teal green stripe that broadens into a turquoise band, stretching across the ocean and rolling into the shoreline with a white foam that makes the sand look like a pale yellow.

There’s a distant sun, but _who needs it_ when the sky is painted sideways and faint impressions of clouds are the only thing in sight, where the wind moves against the smooth, rolling waves and sailboats dot the distance.

“This is amazing!” he calls out to the person in front of him. They’re still running, but they turn back to him, the wind whipping their hair around their eyes. Lance grins brightly, widely, carelessly, and suddenly the ocean doesn’t mean a damn thing.

 

* * *

 

When he wakes, he thinks he’s alone in the cold sterilization of a med wing, and he’s right, until he notices the pair of eyes staring solemnly down at him in the darkness.

 _Krolia,_ he tries to croak, but the words can’t come out. His throat feels like it’s been ripped to shreds.

“You could’ve died,” she tells him. “I got you out, and only just in the nick of time. The atmosphere was toxic, and none of the agents who made contact lasted for more than a few minutes.” She pauses, and he feels the impact in the silence. You're a lucky one, she means, because you're not dead like the others. “You’ll be fine in a few hours. The medication will do its job. You can sleep it off.”

What about you, he asks with a tilt of his head. How did you get out alive?

His mother gives him a cryptic look.

“I always go in prepared,” she tells him, which isn’t much of an answer, but his limbs feel like jelly and his tongue has forgotten how to move, so he doesn’t push it. She stays a moment longer, unblinking, and then slowly stands. The white sheet draped up to his chest (it makes him feel as though he’s a corpse awaiting autopsy, ready to be sent to the morgue) falls and rustles slightly as she stands. He’s still in his uniform; perhaps that’s why his limbs feel so stiff. She only pulls the sheet back up again, turns, and leaves without another word.  The med wing is nowhere near as comforting as the castle, but is twice as frigid, twice as hollow, despite being so much smaller.

Her form shrinks and recedes into the darkness.

 

* * *

 

He goes back to sleep, but doesn’t dream of beaches again, no matter how hard he tries.

 

* * *

 

“What’s up, fucker?”

“LET ME IN!” Lotor’s voice explodes through the comms, and she winces. Switching back to audio, she sees him hammering against the side of the lion with a fist.

He's been out here for what feels like hours, scrubbing away at the side of the green lion like his life depended on it. He doesn't know why they can't just clean the lions in the hangar, but the youngest paladin had only waved a dismissive hand and launched into a spiel about space debris and electromagnetic buildup. Lotor conceded not only to appease her, but so he didn't have to listen to her _talk_ anymore.

She never did explain, though, why she couldn't clean the lion herself.

“NO!” Pidge yells through the comm. The lion remains resolutely shut, and Lotor remains hovering in space. At least she gave him a jetpack.

“Why?” he screams. He hopes that his voice in her ear is magnified by the comm, because at this point, he knows that she knows that he knows that she's doing this on purpose, he knows it.

Pause.

“Fuck you, that’s why!” she hollers back.

 

* * *

 

When he wakes again, nearing what he would judge to be mid-afternoon (if the ship was anywhere near a sun of sorts), there is no one attending to him. He’s fine with that. It’s not because the Blade doesn’t care - it has to, if it wants enough soldiers to churn up and spit back onto the field - but simply that he’s already improving on his own, and he’s not a priority. Indeed, there are few other inhabitants in the med wing. Most left overnight. Keith’s medication is self-applicable and lays on the table next to his cot.

Even the Blade doesn’t have anything as efficient as the castle’s healing pods, but they do have an equivalent of healing gel packets. Once Keith manages to get one open, the material inside is silvery, rolls and pools in his gloved palm like mercury, and registers so cold on his bare skin that it shocks him like a burn.

“What...the _fuck_ …” he gasps through gritted teeth. Evidently, he’s not quiet enough, because someone politely coughs from the doorway of the med wing.

“You didn’t apply anything beforehand to induce anesthesia,” Krolia says helpfully from where she’s standing. Keith didn’t hear her arrive. “You may as well not, because it’ll be working in a few moments anyway, but it’s just a heads-up, in case something happens again.”

“Noted,” he groans, gnashing his teeth against the burning sensation on his skin. He feels as though the cold is seeping into his bones, but his joints have relaxed, and the ache around his lungs is diminishing slowly.

Keith might trade a limb to be unconscious for this part.

 

* * *

 

He doesn't mention it to anyone, and they don't ask.

 

* * *

 

The calls are long in between, and Lance seems to understand when he doesn't take his calls for a few nights.

Keith doesn’t trust things that come easy (he can’t) so maybe that’s why he trusts Lance implicitly by now, because when it comes to the two of them, _nothing_ is easy.

The two of them bicker like cats, and while Keith can inflict angry wounds, Lance makes his cut deep and bloody without realizing he’s doing it. Coexisting is difficult by default; whereas Keith is painstakingly absent (from the team, from a home, from his lion, from the desert) in so many ways that it hurts, these days, Lance is in a constant state of leaving. He can’t help it.

Lance leaves in a hurry this time, too, something about another distress call and being _“...needed immediately, now, Lance!”_ At least, that's all he can make out of the din in the background. It sounds like Allura. It’s not the first time that they’ve cut their talks short - usually, it’s Keith lunging for the _end call_ button when he hears someone coming (it’s not prohibited, but in a secret organization where no secrets are to be kept in the common ranks, something so private and partial is not to be shared). As of lately, there have been an increasing number of planets calling for help in the wake of Zarkon’s fractured empire, and Voltron is never with a shortage of work. Lance fumbles with the camera and shoots him a quick smile.

“Hasta la later, Keith!”

The screen goes black before he can return the sentiment, and Keith is left to stare at his reflection in the empty screen.

God, he looks heartsick.

 

* * *

 

Keith is alone again, cradled in the darkness of the barracks, when he completely realizes that he’s in love, and he feels so stupid because _of course._ (It takes him almost dying alone on a foreign planet, betrayed by his own lungs, to even confront the suspicion, but he’s had it now, the clouds have parted and shit, and he still feels like an idiot.)

 

* * *

 

“Your friend was a half-breed. That didn’t bother you?” Lotor asks, carefully inquisitive. He opens one eye and glances over at Lance, who’s applying his own face mask with quick, practiced motions. If there’s one thing Lotor is glad about, it’s that at least one person on this ship knows the importance of proper skincare.

“No, it doesn’t. Should it?” Lance tells him. His voice is hard, carrying none of the casual laughter from moments before, and Lotor wonders if he’s hit a nerve. He narrows his eyes and files it away for another day.

“No, of course not. It’s just that the paladins of Voltron come from Earth, and you had just learned of extraterrestrial life, had you not? Having an alien in your midst must’ve been quite a shock.”

“I guess.” The boy shrugs, examining his nails. “But Keith is just...you know, _Keith_. Whoever his parents are, it’s none of our business.” Ah, the red paladin was an orphan. It’s not unexpected, although he was under the impression that he and the Black Paladin were brothers. He’s never thought to ask, but even if he had, it’s not like he would approach him now.

Voltron’s leader isn’t what he says he is, and Lotor doesn’t want to bring it up with Allura before he’s absolutely certain, but he has his suspicions that his father’s witch is involved somehow - evidence suggests that the Black Paladin is caught up in something beyond him. It doesn’t make a difference, luckily, because Voltron has Lotor now, believe it or not, and two can play at that game. He’s careful around Shiro because he’s not quite sure what to make of him, not yet. He knows about the monstrosities of Haggar’s so-called “experiments”, how she uses magic to reach into minds and twist them into something that serves her. He always was unnerved by her use of quintessence, and her fascination with corrupting nature. Witchcraft is dangerous, almost more so than science, merely for its unpredictability.

Lotor isn’t too worried. He doesn’t need magic to mess with minds, which is why he’s more dangerous by the tenthfold.

“You know, we used to dispose of unwanted children by burying them in the sand of uninhabited desert planets and leaving them to die,” Lotor inputs, tapping his chin thoughtfully.

“Not to be racist, but Galran people suck.” Lance says without thinking, irritable. An image of Keith’s motorcycle, moving faster than the wind and carving tunnels through red dunes flashes through his mind. Lotor only sighs.

“Believe me, I know.”

 

* * *

 

Shiro doesn’t really call him, at least not on the daily basis that Pidge does or the dedication that he and Lance seem to have built up. He asks Kolivan about him and instructs him to eat his vegetables when he can, therefore fulfilling his role as an older brother, but contact is seldom enough that Keith is still mildly surprised when the incoming call is from Shiro. Of course, the first thing that comes out of Shiro’s mouth is, “Keith, can you please explain to me why Pidge locked Lotor out of the castle for two hours and then tried to strand him in space?” That part isn't surprising, at least, except for the fact that Shiro is convinced that Keith has any power over Pidge.

“What?”

“It’s not murder, but I have to follow up on it, nonetheless.” Shiro’s resigned sigh alone tells Keith that it’s a habit rather than a moral obligation of any sort.

“Why would I have anything to do with it?” he asks, not sure whether or not he should be feigning innocence. He can almost hear Shiro’s eyeroll over the line.

“When I asked her, all she said was ‘I’m doing this for Keith’, like that was supposed to explain everything.”

“Oh, um. I have no idea?”

 

* * *

 

Keith’s being more evasive than Shiro’s used to, but the mere fact that he’s somehow still alive and breathing is a goddamn miracle, so Shiro doesn’t press the matter nearly as much as he should.

Instead, he focuses more on catching up and having an honest to god conversation, something he feels like he hasn't had in a long while. As it turns out, he missed a lot.

“I - I found someone really important to me. I stopped looking for them, or even believing that I’d meet them _years_ ago, but I found them. They’re real.”

“Keith -”

“Mothman’s real, Shiro.”

“What.”

“He’s real! Mira showed me their database, and there’s thousands of different species, but I found one that looks exactly like him. The eyes, the wings, everything - You thought I was crazy, but guess who was fucking right? Me. I was.”

“I thought this was a phase,” Shiro groans.

“I was right about aliens, and I was right about Area 51. You thought I was crazy, but guess what? I was right about Mothman too, Shiro, so suck it -”

“This is what I get for sending you that BuzzFeed video, isn’t it? Dammit, Keith, I thought we got over this.”

“I was never really over it, Shiro. It just rekindled my faith.”

“I’m actually going to kill myself.”

“He’s real. I - I can’t believe it. This entire time we were looking for him in Virginia, when we really should've just gone to _space_ …”

“It’ll be quick, too. The team won’t even notice I’m gone.”

“First Krolia, now this -”

“I’m so fucking done with - wait, wait, wait, who’s Krolia?”

“It’s like I have a whole new purpose in life - oh, yeah. That. I found my mom, too. Anyway, it turns out that Mothman’s actually part of an alien race that can do interdimensional teleportation. They’re actually responsible for a lot of cow abductions on Earth, and it explains why -”

“Did I hear that right?”

Keith pauses.

“Yeah, it was interdimensional travel all along, and -”

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, in the astral plane, he only barks out a short laugh and messages his temples. “See, if I had to suffer, then you have to suffer, too.”

 

* * *

 

“Moping about your boyfriend again?”

“He's _not_ my boyfriend,” Keith says sourly. He imagines her grinning on the other side of the line.

“What are you going to do about that?”

“Nothing.” Keith says shortly.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Lotor’s doing something about it.” Pidge whistles, matter-of-fact. Keith winces. That one stings.

“I don't care,” he bites out.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Got it.”

“...”

“Yes?”

“What's Lance doing about it?”

“I thought you didn’t care?” she asks, a sly grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. Keith grunts noncommittally, while Pidge only latches on, intrigued. “What’s the sitch?”

“The _what?_ ”

“What's the _situation?_  You know, Kim Possible? Never mind,” she shakes her head at his blank expression. “Spill the tea. I won't tell.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

“Your throbbing hard on for Lance says otherwise.”

“Language, Pidge.”

“Fuck you, you're not my dad.”

“Shiro would say the same thing.”

She sighs. “True, but he’s not my _real_ dad. Also, you’re trying to change the topic, aren't you?” She clicks her tongue; poor, emo Keith couldn’t approach subtlety with an invisible tripwire, not on purpose, at least. “This isn’t about me, this is about you. And Lance. You and Lance.”

“There is no me and Lance,” he says flatly.

She snorts.

“It’s long distance. It would never work,” he tries again.

“Maybe.”

“We hate each other.”

“No, you don’t.” She’s right, as usual.

“He probably doesn’t even like me!” Keith protests.

“Debatable.”

“I don’t even know if I like him!” _I don’t even know if I_ want _to like him_ is what he means, because he doesn’t, really. Lance always did have a way of making him do things he never thought he would. Pidge, with uncharacteristic patience, only tells him,

“You don’t have to lie, Keith.”

“It’s true. We’re literal worlds apart, and we have completely different lives now. We all have different roles, and the only time we’ll ever cross paths in the field is in the middle of a battle, and even then, one of us will probably end up dead. Would you do that to someone? Invest in something while - while there’s a _war_ going on?” The stakes are too high, he argues. Killing in cold blood and going to war until he’s numb with the feeling doesn’t mix with love or Lance, and it shouldn’t. He doesn’t want it to.

“You’re not a bad person, Keith, and neither is Lance. It’s not selfish. You deserve -”

“We’re not together, and I want him to be happy, but I don’t want him to be happy with anyone else but me. Is that not selfish?”

She shrugs. “Sounds like love to me.”

“Huh.”

“Keith, I gotta go.” There’s a harsh shuffling noise on her end, likely her swinging herself off of the corner of her bunk and heading out the door. He can already hear alarms on her side, and his first thought is of Lance, probably doing the same thing in his own room, (Lance, reaching for his helmet and sprinting off into the unknown - smiling so brightly that his eyes crease just a bit and dimples frame his face - the two of them hurtling through the universe like a pair of comets, crashing into the sun) ready for battle.

“Okay.” Keith says dumbly.

“Call me, beep me, if you wanna reach me.”

“Uh, what?”

“Gotta go!”

“I -” he starts, but she hangs up before he's finished opening his mouth. “Bye, then,” he says into the empty line.

 

* * *

 

They’ve liberated another planet, one notch in the long list of destinations before they reach the end of Zarkon’s reign. It’s an easy enough fight, one they didn’t even have to form Voltron for, which Lance is grateful for - what he’s not exactly grateful for is the insistent paranoia from the planet’s residents. It’s not just him; Shiro’s patience is stretched thin, and Lance remembers when he was exposed to Slav for a similar period of time. No wonder the man was losing his grip on reality.

Regardless, the leader of the planet _insists_ that the team stay for an _undetermined_ amount of time, patrolling in case the Galra return, which Lance finds unlikely, but it’s not his place to argue. Luckily, Allura whittles _undetermined_ down to a quintant. Not so luckily, that essentially sentences the paladins of Voltron to orbiting a tiny planet for an entire day after they’ve just fought a short lived yet energetic battle. As Lance expected, it sucks ass.

They’ve been waiting around for more than what would be half a day, and Lance is cursing his lion - dear, beloved Blue - because although whoever designed the lions in the first place was clearly a genius, they must have either not had a brain or been particularly masochistic, because none of the lions have toilets.

“Alright, enough grumbling,” Shiro commands, although his own voice lacks the usual authority it carries. He sounds like he’s moments away from falling asleep on his own dashboard.

“C’mon, I know we’re all thinking it!” Lance whines, and he does know it. They have a psychic connection, after all. “We’ve been patrolling this planet for hours without taking a single break. We’re all tired, dizzy, and hungry. I need to piss. We can make _one_ pit stop.”

He doesn’t expect it to work, really, but when Shiro hesitates to veto the plea and Pidge chimes in that they’re absolutely _starving,_ Lance knows that Shiro will cave, and the day is won.

The joint they end up at is as wrecked as they must look; being stuck in any vehicle for a day will do that to a person. The shadows under Shiro’s eyes are almost as dark as his eyeliner, and Pidge’s hair, which has grown to her shoulders by now, is tangled in all directions. They don’t have any form of currency with them (despite Lance’s suggestion to sell Pidge, who is already travel-sized for convenience), but luckily, the planet sees them as saviors and doesn’t refuse what little service they can provide.

Less fortunately, the closest establishment with a working toilet is a merging of two businesses; one of which cradles a dingy diner setting with cramped tables and the smell of hot grease wafting from an even smaller kitchen (fast food must be a universal concept, much to Hunk’s simultaneous joy and disgruntlement). A full stomach lifts their spirits significantly, enough to prompt them to explore the left side of the building instead of immediately heading back to the lions they’ve been crammed into for the past few hours.

The side with the bathroom (it’s no Japanese toilet, but it flushes just as any toilet should) is less of a restaurant, and more of a pawn shop filled with a variety of trinkets categorized along narrow aisles.

“What, so it's like a dollar store?” Pidge casts a sly glance at Lance. “Maybe we can get a muzzle. A collar for a dollar.” He sticks his tongue out at her, and she only snorts and pokes through the aisles and examines the merchandise under a careful eye. “Nothing’s very expensive here.”

“What does it say?” Hunk asks. She flips over a packet, squinting at the tiny font printed on the back. “Is that a...space blunt? In a dollar store?”

“They’re selling space weed,” Pidge hisses in realization, sounding too thrilled for her own good. “We’re gonna get high in space!” She sounds as though it’s a dream come true, until Hunk gently bats her hands away.

“Not under our watch, you’re not.”

“Shiro, look,” Lance shakes the packet under his nose. “It's the good kush.”

“It's the dollar store, how good could it be?” Shiro replies on autopilot, looking up at them wearily. It's not his best response, but Shiro’s been running on nothing but the stale energy bars and sheer willpower for the past fifteen hours, and he feels like he's entitled to the jet lag.

Lance and Pidge freeze, while Hunk only cradles his face in his hands, God bless him.

“What Shiro _means_ to say,” Allura forces out, shooting him a disapproving look that makes him wilt, “is that recreational drug use is _not_ behavior befitting of paladins of Voltron.”

“Allura’s right,” he sighs wistfully, trying to blink the exhaustion out of his eyes. “Regardless of how good it might be.” Allura looks like she wants to skewer him. He gulps. “Or might not be?” he tries to amend.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Lance begins. “Let me tell you the story of how Takashi Shirogane, famed pilot of the black lion, war hero and expert leader, and all-around DILF, was sentenced to at least thirty straight minutes of public humiliation by an angry space princess in the dollar store of a newly liberated planet.”

Keith only stares at the screen and wonders whether he should’ve answered Lance’s call or not.

 

* * *

 

He’s never heard Lance sing before, but he mentioned once that he used to play guitar back on Earth, and Keith can see it. While Keith has grown accustomed to girlish shrieks and shrill voice cracks from Lance _screaming_ so damn much, he’s also heard Lance’s voice when it goes smooth and low and intense; it’s only been directed at him once, but he took the sound and tucked it into the back of his memory for safekeeping. Lance’s concentration leaves some to be desired, but when he _does_ concentrate and manages to focus on one thing at a time, it’s like Keith’s met him before but only a small part of one faceted surface.

When Lance isn’t focusing on what he’s saying, he prattles on longer and farther than Keith ever thought possible. At the very least, he’s a good storyteller, because the smallest moments can be blown wide and expanded in vivid detail in a way that Keith couldn’t manage if he tried.

“And then Pidge told Lotor that he couldn't sit with us because he had hemorrhoids, but he didn't know what those were, so he just _agreed_ and -”

“Wait, wait, why'd she say that?” Keith was listening, really, he was, but he was also admiring the sharp curve of his jaw and the way his frame looked less lanky and more limber without his jacket. The two are propped up in similar positions on their respective beds, but the way that Lance slouches across his pillows and lazily nudges the screen on his end while simultaneously managing to chatter his head off is admirable.

“‘I can’t sit anywhere, Meghan’.” Lance says in an odd, nasally voice. Keith looks at him blankly.

“I’m Keith.”

“Y’know, like...? The vine?”

“The what? Like...a plant?”

“No, no Keith…” Lance pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I lived in a shack for a year,” Keith feels compelled to point out. “You can’t expect me to know _everything._ ”

“ _Clearly_.” Lance sighs and brushes a hand through his hair. “We have so much to catch you up on, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” Keith says, lost in thought and the way his fingers look sweeping his hair aside.

These days, he has half a mind to shake the screen and blurt out that he's in love with him, has possibly been in love with him the entire time.

Luckily, his other half a mind vehemently opposes this action, and while Keith has always been reckless and bold and ready for blood, he can count on his fingers the number of times he's been particularly brave.

On the _other_ hand, either he or Lance could easily perish within minutes of signing off without the other knowing, so it _really does make more sense_ to just get it out in the open before Lance gets himself blown up or Keith’s body ends up in the dumpster of a foreign planet. _BUT_ if he confesses and Lance doesn't feel the same - and honestly, why would he - then that's a beautiful friendship he's just gone and ruined. Lance might even pretend it never happened, and whatever it is between them will be whittled back down to some petty, one-sided rivalry while Keith pines away, and then he's back to square one.

The thought has his fingers clenching. That’s a mistake.

The screen fractures and crunches from inside his fist; he releases his grip in a panic - somehow, light still flickers between the broader fractures that web the device. The image is gone, and all that’s left is white and gray hues flickering across the screen like static, but the audio still (miraculously) works, even though he can feel the broken prices shifting against one another like mirror shards. Pidge really did do her best on this one.

“Keith? What happened?” Lance’s voice drifts from his hand. Keith rubs the back of his neck, sheepish, and examines the ruined device.

“I may or may not have broken it.”

A pregnant pause.

“Way to go, Keith.”

“Fuck off.”

 

* * *

 

A man bent on escape is inspired; it's written in the desperation of his movements, the thoughtless execution of his plans. There's a question, too, that follows after his prison is left far behind. How did he scale that roof, for example? How did he fit through the vents? When did he learn he wouldn't die?

As it happens, Pidge has no questions, and she's no man. She knows exactly where she needs to go - she trusts her tech more than anything else up here (then again, there's not exactly a lot of options).

Man, she thinks. Man up, my ass.

Dripping in sweat and soaked in oil and grime accumulated from shuffling through narrow vents that would've suffocated Lance and been impossible for Hunk to get a leg through, Pidge is exhausted and uncomfortable to the highest degree. The dark shaft is so small that she can't turn her head to look behind her; she has no choice but to plow on, on her hands and knees.

Lance’s voice filters through her helmet, which is placed in front of her bent knees and behind her elbows as she crawls to allow for more breathing room. It is undoubtedly getting covered in filth, but there's no room, and the air is already stuffy - she can hear him giving his updates - “I'm at the last post, I just took out the guards there, but there should be more. Is the next door unlocked yet?”

“I have your coordinates, and I'm almost to the exit point.”

Her joints ache, and the dusty air is getting unbearable. She's been in these rotten corridors for what feels like hours, and she's nearly lost all hope when -

The ground bottoms out below her, and she falls into the abyss with a muffled shout.

 

* * *

 

Pidge lands hard, but the metal beneath her is a flimsy sheet of metal that's a lot more secure than the rest of the vents, so she bounces a little instead of crushing her skull. It's a pleasant surprise, but the _clank_ of her paladin armor resonates throughout the space like a drumbeat.

She scoots up, recovers her bearings. No broken bones. Her technology is still up and running. Her head’s a little sore, though.

She taps her wrist and a hologram lights up the space, illuminating the same dusty walls. She’s still in the ventilation system, but it's branched off and lower to the ground - she's huddled in a joined alcove that connects one shaft to another, and thankfully it's roomy enough for her to sit cross-legged. According to her blueprints, that also means that -

She kicks the vent paneling out of the wall and pops her head out, taking huge gasps of fresh air that are noisier than she means for them to be.

“Upgrading security annex,” she says into her comm. “We’ll have access to the doors beyond level three in a minute.” Pidge shifts forward and somersaults out of the opening, rolling onto her feet and into the hallway. Lance lets out a breath of relief, and she takes half a second to let her eyes adjust to the luminescent lights of the abandoned hallway, just as a familiar blue figure rounds the corner.

Right on schedule.

 

* * *

 

 “Pidge, what's your status?” he whispers, bayard held out in front of him like a vice. He's doing a funny walk; it's almost a sashay, except more quickly and with slightly less hip movement - she recognizes it from the countless spy movies and television shows she and Matt used to watch. At the moment, Lance is perfectly imitating the token hot girl with a gun. Pidge rolls her eyes.

“Upgrading.”

“What about now?” Lance asks, his voice taking on a wheedling tone. “Are you done now, because we kind of need -”

“Upgrading,” she repeats irritably.

“Pidge -”

“It's still upgrading -” just then, the door panels meters ahead of them light up violet. Pidge is halfway to congratulating herself “- I fucking told you so -” when the door slides open, revealing a whole row of Galra soldiers. “Fuck, go back!”

 

* * *

 

 Pidge doesn’t think that she can carry him all the way back to the Lions, but she really has no choice. Between dragging him back to the castle with her bare hands and leaving him to die in a hallway, she chooses the more physically draining of the two.

She's not going to lose another brother, not again.

 

* * *

 

 “How does it look?” His eyes are squeezed shut, and his jaw is clenched so hard that she can see the muscles straining in his neck. Lance’s breath comes out in tight pants, and she sees him bite his lip hard enough to draw blood, trying not to scream.

The floor of her lion is painstakingly sterile, just like the rest of it. Lance’s blood doesn’t belong there, nor does it belong pooling out from underneath his armor. The darkness of his gloves almost hides the red, but his fingertips leave orange brown smears against the white of his armor when he grips the wound. It takes every ounce of her self-control not to vomit all over him.

Because Pidge is panicking, (and to think, she's supposed to be the analytical one) she doesn't have a filter, so she blurts out,

“In my professional opinion as a doctor, you're fucked.”

Well, she never was best known for her bedside manner. Luckily, Lance is either delirious on the pain or doesn't care, because he just huffs out a laugh.

“You don't have a degree, Pidge.”

“I'm not the one bleeding out, though, so who would you trust to make the calls here?” she snaps in spite of herself. “Allura, we need a pod, asap.”

Her response is immediate, promising that _they're almost there_ and that _Lance just needs to hold on._

“It's not that bad,” he tries to reassure her. Laughter, hysterically shrill and disjointed, threatens to bubble up through her throat and cut off air. It is that bad, she tries to say, it is that bad because I let it be.

“I wasn’t watching your back.”

“You were hacking their security systems, there’s no way that you could’ve -”

“You’re our sharpshooter, and you always look out for us - the least I could’ve done -  I could’ve scanned thermal readings or paid more attention to the video feeds. There’s a lot of things I could’ve done, but I didn’t, because I was thinking too much. I was almost too late, I was supposed to be your partner in this -”

“Pidge, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.”

If Keith was here, she tells herself. If Keith was here, this wouldn’t have happened, because he had this sort of infatuation with everything Lance-related that acted as a gravitational pull, and he wouldn’t have taken his eyes off of him, not for a second. She doesn’t have that. She loves Lance too, as many have before her, as the brother that she already has, but she got distracted and she got him shot.

 

* * *

 

 She can't talk to Hunk, because it's _his_ best friend in there that's waiting in a pod like a Guinea pig trying to knit himself back together. She doesn’t think that he'd be mad at her - he's too good for that and the most forgiving person she's ever met - but again, Lance is _his_ best friend, and a section of his torso is still on the floor of her lion. It doesn't feel right.

Allura and Coran are monitoring him.

She can't look Takashi in the eye. The Shiro from before would've laid a hand on her shoulder, told her that it was a _mistake_ and a slipup that could've happened to anybody, and freezing on the field was an obstacle that she should work to overcome but never be ashamed of. The Shiro from after would be disappointed, and while she knows that she deserves it, she's getting the feeling that selflessness isn't her defining trait.

“Keith.”

“Hey, what’s - wait, did something happen? Pidge, what happened?” His voice is groggy with sleep but it comes out worried nonetheless, and the brotherly tone makes her want to cry.

“Keith, I messed up.” She swallows, hard. “Lance is in a pod again, and it’s my fault.”

The line is silent.

 

* * *

 

Keith remembers the way his face looked in the reflection of the empty screen, the last time after Lance had left. He’d looked hopeful and damned all at once, _full_ with something between regret and anticipation for what was to come.

Now Pidge is telling him that Lance went and got himself shot again and it’s bad enough that he’s staying overnight in a pod. He should be fine, but if it missed - if he’d dived in front of Pidge any faster or any slower, it could’ve embedded itself into something more fatal. She’s telling him _over_ _the phone_ and he’s cold with fury.

 

* * *

 

Lance, however, is elsewhere.

The sand between his toes is coarse and gritty, nothing like the fine textures of Valderado. The grains burn like miniature coals, hot and sharp, but when he closes his eyes and takes a breath to the feel, it's a steady, constant burn that doesn't bring pain so much as it sears life into the soles of his feet.

Lance squints up into the horizon, towards the white half-sun that glitters in the sky without mercy and raises a hand to wipe his brow. When he draws it away, it's slick with sweat. Rocky canyons, striped red and gold and brown, carve out the skyline, which starts in a peculiar shade of blue and fades to purple and red where it meets the strange canyon curves and rocky structures. Lance is somewhat awed.

_Where am I?_

Wind touches the slopes of the desert with a gentle hand, and when it touches him, it is cool against his skin. The heat is tangible in the distance, and waves like the whisper of the ocean and dances like death. Lance is charmed to be invited.

There are no trees in sight, no sign of life for miles, and the desert lies still and unmoving. He supposes that there must be a cactus or two around here somewhere, if not in plain sight. This landscape is beautiful, yes, and dead, and full of glass.

Should he be scared? No, he decides. There's no need. A place that's dead will not raise a finger. There's something comforting about the bare silence of it all, which is odd, because noise is something Lance has grown used to and ingrained in his bones to the point where the _absence of it_ was unsettling. But now he is taken by a strange calm that he can’t quite place. He feels wild and dignified in the face of something so barren and beautiful.

Lance cups his hands around his mouth. _“HELLO?”_ he bellows into the world, and it’s as if the dome of his hands serve as a horn, because the sound soars and ricochets back to him, startling in its clarity.

 _HELLO,_ the canyons sing back.

_HELLO_

_Hello_

_hello_

Suddenly, a shadow bursts in the sky and blocks out the sun, and for a moment, the desert blinks out of existence, and something in Lance goes with it, but then it comes back, brighter and hotter than before, and the shadow is but a shape in the sky, hurtling towards the beaded earth.

 _It’s Batman,_ Lance thinks distantly before the shadow casts itself to the ground, carves a figure from the sun, and picks itself up.

It lands below him, in the curve of one of the faraway dunes in between Lance and the foreground, and he can barely make out its shape.

The figure waits.

Lance stares.

“C’mon! Hurry up!” it shouts finally, waving an arm up at him and sounding shockingly human for something that can’t decide what to be. Its voice is deep and throaty and something jubilant, darker and better than the air, and sets up a pace in Lance’s chest that he later realizes is his heart, beating along to the pulse of the sun.

His feet are numb from the heat and the rest of him isn’t faring much better, but he starts a fumbling walk towards the shadow, wading through dunes like the Red Sea and moving forward until the horizon blooms off into the distance.

 

* * *

 

 When he wakes, he expects to see a pale, angular face and gray eyes up in his face, tapping impatiently at the glass, or, perhaps, leaning against the wall with crossed arms and an unreadable expression. That’s how it usually pans out.

The pod doors open with a hiss, and the light is suddenly harsher than it was in the dream. Lance holds himself back from stumbling out, knowing in the back of his mind that no one will be there to catch him.

When Lance wakes, he’s alone, and the absence hurts more than he thought it would. He settles back and waits. One of them will be making their rounds, probably to check up on him. For now, he can close his eyes.

Rest.

 

* * *

 

“But look at me. I’m fine now.”

“Yeah, _now,”_ his voice comes out incredulous. like he’s being choked, strangled, even. _What about next time,_ he thinks. What about the next time that Lance throws himself in front of his friends and takes a shot to the head or abdomen or somewhere that proves equally fatal?

Keith doesn’t think of himself as a murderer, but he’s done it before. All of them were trying to kill him first, but it doesn’t change the way that a Galra soldier’s mouth opens into a startled _O_ or hardens into a grimace, the way they shudder and then go slack and slump onto the ground like puppets whose strings have been cut.

He’s cut and run from a blur of empty faces more times than he can count.

He’s run so fast that he doesn’t hear them hit the ground but can feel it in his marrow.

Keith has seen death and will know it all his life.

“I promised I’d be fine, didn’t I? Friends don’t lie to each other.” Keith imagines Lance smiling again, weak on his face but just as pretty.

Keith wants to punch him in the face (or maybe kiss him).

He can’t, because Lance isn’t really _here._ None of them are. They’ve been talking through a screen all this time, just like Keith is watching them through a lens, along with the billions of aliens on the other side. He knows that it really is Pidge talking shit about Lotor through the phone, just as it really is Shiro who asks about him during video conferences with Kolivan, and it’s Lance who tells him about his day and laughs at him like nothing has changed in the evenings, but in reality, _everything_ has changed.

It’s hard to be angry at someone who isn’t there, but somehow Keith manages it.

“Oh, so we're friends now?” Keith snaps before he can stop himself.

Lance’s face falls.

“What?”

“I thought we were _rivals,_ Lance. Isn't that what you always say? You and me, neck and neck?” It comes out meaner than he even thought he could be, but he can’t stop himself. Lance’s eyes widen in - well, it’s something. Shock? Anger? It could be both.

“That’s not funny, dude. Stop it.” Lance frowns, taken aback, and Keith agrees with his hurt tone, because _what the hell, Keith?_

“Stop what? You’re a funny guy,” Keith sneers, “you can take a joke.”

“What the hell is your problem?”

“I don’t know! I don’t - just stop it, okay? Stop doing that!”

“Stop doing what?”

“Stop promising!”

 

* * *

 

Neither of them sleeps that night.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps he and Lance do have a lot in common - Lance is traipsing around the universe pining for his family, while all this time Keith’s been bleeding out for a blue paladin (and bleeding out for the family he never had, in Shiro and the rest of them).

Lance makes promises he knows he can’t keep because he has something to go back to, some family on a beach in Varadero. Marco, Luis, Veronica. Lance had repeated it like a mantra, like he wanted to cling so hard to the memory that it would hurt, and maybe it did. Marco, Luis, Veronica. Marco was the youngest, and then Luis, and then Veronica - they’re anchors to a different home on a beach Keith has never seen, in a country that he has never been to, back on a planet that he left with a wild joy.

Memories and a beaten shack swathed in sand ties him to Earth, but those bonds are half-hearted. There was Shiro, but he left too, swallowed up by space. Keith tried to follow, failed, tried again, and found a triumph more serendipitous than anything else.

Out here, in space, they’re heroes. Back on Earth, they're just a handful of dead children.

 

* * *

 

_“Stop promising!” Keith yelled, and Lance nearly dropped the device. The silence that followed was heavy and lined with lead, and a second later, Keith hung up on him. It figures, Lance snorted to himself._

What was he even talking about? Lance wracks his brains for a promise or a deal he could’ve struck before this - this - whatever it was. Was it an argument? Even for Lance, who’s used to pissing people off on accident, this feels remarkably one sided, and if Keith would just yank out the stick in his ass and maybe _talk about what he’s feeling_ for once in his life, then they wouldn’t have to end a call fuming. Lance doesn’t consider himself a heavy sleeper by any means, but the fact remains that he’s finding it literally impossible to get any shut-eye, and his sheets are already a tangled mess from tossing and turning back and forth.

There’s no way he’s going to lose sleep over Keith _fucking_ Kogane. This isn’t like his days in the Garrison. Lance likes to think that he’s matured, if marginally so, but matured nonetheless.

Didn’t his mother always say not to go to bed upset? _“It’s the key to a long marriage,”_ she had told him with a wink. At the time, he thought of Jenny Shaybon and the tight, frizzy red curls that framed her face and the way she hid her nose behind a hand and giggled when he tripped down the school steps. He thought that maybe he was in love, and someday they’d have kids and move into a big house and grow old together, and that was all he wanted in life.

Then Lance went to space, and there were other things to worry about.

Lance has already made up his mind when he reaches for his bedside table, groping blindly in the dark. He’s going to call him back, and Keith is going to forgive him if it kills him.

Somewhere, back on Earth, Rosa McClain deserves a medal of some sort. She sure as hell didn’t raise no bitch.

 

* * *

 

Keith lives in the catacombs of a fallen era, surrounded by thousands and distinctly alone, so when it's just him (small, wet, shivering like a stray) the dark feels so much bigger. He thinks back to when it was just Shiro, some beacon of hope shining in a tunnel in his periphery, and then to the Paladins and how they felt more like _friends_ and then like _home_ and maybe - well, it doesn’t matter now.

Marmora is his life now, and it’s a fact that he’s struggling to accept, but he’s a quick study, and he’ll wrap his mind about it eventually.

Kolivan clears his throat, startling him out of his thoughts.

“You needed to see me?”

“Krolia spoke to me while you were in the infirmary. She has a few concerns.”

Ah. Keith wonders if he’s about to get sort-of-fired from his sort-of-full time job. Keith tilts his head. His mother was distant, but she meant well, and he thought that maybe - well, it didn’t matter now. After the Blades kick him to the curb, it’ll be like the Garrison all over again, but this time he won’t know where to go beyond his ejection into space. _Calm down, Keith._ Think, think. What would Shiro do?

 _Are you happy here?_ sounds like something he’d ask him, gentle and coaxing. He would want Keith to be happy, and if he’s very honest, he’s not very happy here, but he’s content.

It's hard to be happy in space, because that's a stable, constant sort of thing, and Keith’s life so far has been anything but. He misses the desert because it is gutted and laid bare, stripped of everything but its bones, and space is cold and infinite and impossible to house in his head. Keith feels like the desert, because sometimes he gets locked inside his mask and knows exactly why, and he can’t escape from it. It sickens him in his marrow.

Regardless, he has a lot of things going for him in this line of business. Krolia, for one. He thrives in discontent, maybe because it’s what he’s accustomed to (and he can't get used to movement without the momentum, so it sends him crashing to the ground and spiraling out of control). He's good here, he fits in better _here,_ goddammit, no matter what Shiro says.

Panic rises in his throat like bile. He’s going to get fired. Shit. This is so _unfair._

“Sir, I didn’t know about the toxins, I swear. Otherwise, I would’ve never jeopardized the objective, but -”

Kolivan holds up a hand to stop him, unreadable.

“You’re not being punished. You’re being reassigned.”

“What?”

 

* * *

 

Blue armor is yanked from his peripheral to the center of his vision and his breath almost leaves him, because he’s seen him nearly every night for months through a tiny, filtered screen in the secrecy of his room, but here he is, the real thing that’s been slowly killing Keith from the inside. His hair is still cropped short, but it’s wavier than he remembers, curling slightly around his temples and brushing above his ears. It’s not a mullet, but definitely a button he can press.

If his pace increases, Krolia doesn’t mention it (she does give him a side-eye, but he doesn’t notice). Lance sees him now too, and he’s just standing there _grinning,_ the asshole, and Keith has to close the distance himself, but that’s okay because Lance is right in front of him, and Keith is suddenly reminded of a beach that he visited once in his dreams.

It could just be Keith’s imagination, but when Lance smiles, his lips line up with the constellation points in his mind. As he gets closer, Lance (who is tall and funny and not so far away after all) leans forward and opens his mouth to speak.

 _Welcome back_ , he’ll say, or something along those lines. He’ll look at Keith like he’s seeing him for the first time, every time, and Keith’s own heart will finally drill a hole in his chest and become lighter than air.

 _It’s good to be back_ , Keith will respond, and it is.

It’s good to be home.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

end

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This cover https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJzxYFyZvFM of Breezeblocks by alt-J is probably what I’d put at the top of the soundtrack for this one shot, and it’s where it got its title from. The next piece feels more like something by Khalid, like Location, maybe?  
>   
> This is a prequel because even though it takes place before Krolia meets the paladins in the next fic, I wrote this directly after because I kept thinking that the characterizations left too much unsaid, so that’s why this one probably feels so much more exposition-y.  
>   
> I can and will admit that this is basically just a shitpost full of vines. Do with that what you will. But if you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to review because those bring me life like nothing else :)


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